The Four Resistances and Who Owns Them

There are four core resistances you'll run into, and different parts of your company tend to be the go-to group for each.

Distrust of claims. Generally marketing's job to overcome.

Reactance. This is where a prospect feels someone is removing or closing down their options and pinning them to something. “Oh, nice card. Do you have it in blue? If I had it in blue, would you buy it right now?” That's a typical bad response to reactance. It tends to be sales' job to overcome.

Scrutiny. In B2B, especially enterprise, subject matter experts deal with scrutiny: senior technical people, even the CTO. Does it comply with this standard? Where will you be on the road map when this other thing happens in the industry? It's usually handled by someone who really understands the ins and outs of what you sell and how you sell it.

Inertia. Everybody's job. In every situation it's your number one competitor. The number one competitor in B2B isn't the biggest company in your category. It's that there's almost never a downside for the employees you're talking to to wait. Every employee knows that putting off a decision until tomorrow has virtually no risk, and it's often the safest thing to do. Then the next day, put it off one more day. And the next. Until six months later you've made no progress on the deal and haven't moved that customer through the funnel at all.

Figuring out how to overcome customer inertia is everyone's job. Those are the four resistances: distrust of claims, reactance, scrutiny and inertia.